Talk:Johnny Casino
The movie is a laughable goody 2 shoe cartoon compared to the play. The play has a dark side (as do all great broadway musicals) When the play closed on Broadway as the longest-running show in Broadway history the script finally became available for anyone to buy. The first it was done after the broadway company closed was at a Junior College in Aptos Ca, close to Santa Cruz. Cabrillo College. I was a student in the music department at the time. The Theater department wanted to do this. Actually the director had put himself first in line to get his hands on the script many years before so we were the first to get our hands on the script. He wanted this to be the first of a string of 3 musicals he wanted the theater department to do back to back. People in the department complained that they were having trouble finding actors who could sing so they decided to see if they could teach singers to act and and dance. So music students who were vocalist were encouraged to audition (and encouraged to take a dance class that would teach them how to learn choreography which I did). I'd have been happy to just be in the chorus but got the phone call ... "you're Johny Casino!". It was more of a thrill to me since I was a huge Manatatten Transfer fan and I had read that the tenor Alan Paul was the original Johnny Casino on broadway and the money he made from the show and Tim Hauser' income from being a cab driver went into a pool that financed Manhatten Transfer in the beginning. My point is that the characters and a couple of scenes have a dark side, and we played that to the hilt. It goes from the joy of the high school hop scene to scene 2 two days later when reality intrudes. This is where the audience is supposed to get emotionally whipsawed from the lightness to the dark reality that the '50s had a more stark reality than the candy assed way the movie treats the story. The Burger Palace Boys are a gang. The weapons are lethal. Danny is a leader through violence and intimidation and the pecking order can't be upset unless someone is willing to take Danny on. The fight scene doesn't happen in the end but all the elements of the lead up are there. After Teen-angle sings "Beauty school dropout", which is heartbreaking, the scene is somber and the mood gets darker as the guys come out of the burger palace, get their weapons out and wait for the rumble. The way our guys played it they let the tension build with displays of angry expression, taking more time between lines, barking the lines, pacing anxiously, weapons brandished trying not to get surprised. The audience is hopefully on the edge of their seats. At that moment The Roger bursts in yelling. They rehearsed that over and over to get the timing right. To make it like a thunderclap after a silence. A long pause then Bang! The way our guys played it I'd hear the audience gasp because he came yelling and sliding to a stop. They didn't play the next lines to be funny. If you look at the dialog it could be played funny but then what would be the point of the whole scene. The way our guys played it when they pounce on Roger and depants him it's done with meanness. It's a violent act intended to both remind him of his lowly status in the group and they used him to use up the adrenaline they were filled with. They leave Roger behind humiliated. This all creates an emotional low for the audience so they can be whipsawed again by the rest of the story and its happy ending. After a quick critique after opening night, the director put the show in our hands. He only made one exception to that after the second week. He told the guys they had to ease up on violence in the scene I described because they were scaring the old ladies in the front row. Then he addressed me. I was about to freak out until he explained. In the introduction before my solo where I hand the microphone to Ms Lynch, she says "thank you Clarence" and my fellow classmates laugh and jeer. The script says I give them the finger. In one of the shows I decided to take liberty there, actually, the whole cast started doing that as the show went on and we'd have meetings if the rest thought someone needed to go back to the script. When the crowd razzed me I didn't just flip them off. I started taking a step toward the edge of the stage, grab my crotch and give my hips a quick thrust. The cast thought it was funny. The old ladies in the audience didn't.